WorldSurfers meeting #92 report

How’s your New Year going? Have you already started your daily exercises in the morning? Or have you been learning a new foreign language for a whole month now? Or probably you have given yourself a solemn promise to stop procrastinating, and have never since that moment yielded to the temptation of checking your social network accounts while doing some important job?

Even though Joey Adams, an American comedian, sounded rather sceptical about the power and the lifespan of New Year resolutions in his well-known quote “May all your troubles last as long as your New Year resolutions”, we feel much more optimistic about them – especially after attending our club’s meeting #92 devoted to commitments made next to the Christmas tree. Let us remember what our meeting #92 was like.

Kristina Sharykina, in her advanced project #5 entitled “The 5th puzzle” from Interpersonal Communication manual, provided a useful insight into the components of effective communication and suggested a 4-stage way to make oneself assertive in a conversation. Kristina, with the support of Gaya Oganesian, also showed an impovised roleplay about a newcomer who arrived at a Toastmasters meeting for the first time and was not aware of the general requirements.

What is common between an employer, a postman and a personal evaluator at a Toastmasters meeting? The answer is that they all occasionally have to deliver bad news to other people. And if you think that this task is not a big deal, we invite you to visit our YouTube channel and watch the video of Alexey Kravtsun’s advanced speech #5 entitled “You are fired! Great, thank you!!!” from Speeches by management manual. Just like Kristina in her performance, Alexey also took advantage of the animating power of a roleplay and, together with Diana Al-Zubi, showed the audience all the ins and outs of announcing a dismissal.

The Table Topics session led by Charles Paris perfectly corresponded to the general theme of the meeting. Each participant was invited to pick a New Year resolution and suggest ways how he or she would try to fulfill it. Charles made the task even more challenging by providing each speaker with some additional circumstance, such as offering a certificate to the best French bakery to a person who had committed to give up eating sweets. And we sincerely congratulate the winner of the Table Topics session – Kristina Sharykina! Kristina provided some interesting recommendations as to how she would cope with the task of reading a book in English if it were her first book in that language.

We hope that you enjoyed the meeting just as much as we did, and we are looking forward to seeing you next time!

You can find all the videos from the meeting on our YouTube channel at the following link: